How does Unity import animations from a .blend file?

I am importing a model and its animations directly from a .blend file inside of Unity’s assets folder. While I’ve had a number of problems getting my information from blender to Unity, I’ve been able to work around most of the problems. However, I don’t know a workaround for this one.

I imported my character and some of its animations into Unity, and set it up how I wanted it. Then I created some new animations for my character, and "Reimport"ed the blend file within Unity. However, my new animations are not showing up in Unity. I know that if I delete all my blend file data from Unity I can put a correct blend file in my assets folder and it will get those animations, but this will cost me all of the in-Unity work I’ve done. Based on prior testing, I’ve found that I MUST import the animations alongside my character, or they won’t work, so exporting just the new animations is not an option.

Is there a way to get Unity to recognize that there are additional animations in my blend file, or is there some other solution I am not aware of?

Yes if you start the whole process exporting your animations separately as shown in the docs, using the @clipname naming convention, it will always pick up new clips as there will be new files. Alternatively if you are exporting one long clip split into individual animations split in the animations tab then you simply add a new split with the correct frame range:

Also you may get better results using a portable file format like FBX:

Unity Support